Video: Time for another lie about Limbaugh’s “phony soldiers” comment

posted at 2:36 pm on October 2, 2007 by Allahpundit

Via Brian Maloney, anything missing from the audio clip here? Any important information or bit of context that might shed light on whom Rush was referring to when he made his “phony soldiers” remark?

Remember, conservative outrage over the “Betray Us” ad is juvenile nonsense that wastes time which would be better spent debating Iraq. Liberal outrage over Rush Limbaugh is important national business.

Update: Maloney also takes a look at Harry Reid’s charming habit of trying to intimidate his critics in the media — while somehow omitting the most notorious example. If, as expected, we end up with President Hillary next year and the Fairness Doctrine reappears on the radar, there’s no doubt which side of the issue Reid will be on.

So I guess VoteVets has 11 members out of how many thousands? They certainly are not even a drop in the bucket as to what our real soldiers believe. BTW……that Jon Stoltz is a complete and total asshoe!!!!!!

Glad that you asked. Redeployment to South Korea or the Pacific, i.e. closer to the madman states (North Korea, Pakistan, China) that already have nukes. Because they want to put our kids out of harms way, you know.

Established in January 2007 with the aim of bringing about an immediate withdrawal of all U.S. troops from Iraq, Americans Against Escalation in Iraq (AAEI) describes itself as “a major, multi-million dollar national campaign to oppose the President’s proposal to escalate the war …”MoveOn.org‘s Washington, DC Director Tom Matzzie to create AAEI. Says Matzzie: “We realized we needed a big campaign on the war because there was this mandate out of the election, but the Democratic majorities were thin and they hadn’t been united on the war, ever.”Prior to his work with MoveOn and AAEI, Matzzie had been an Online Mobilization Director for the AFL-CIO. In 2004 he worked as Director of Online Organizing for John Kerry‘s presidential campaign. In 2006 he worked on behalf of antiwar Democrat Ned Lamont, who was seeking to take a Connecticut Senate seat from Joe Lieberman, the Democrat-turned-Independent who favored America’s involvement in the Iraq War.
After forming AAEI, Matzzie quickly recruited a large team of leftwing activists to join his new organization, which is structured as a coalition of groups devoted to a consistent antiwar objective. Though AAEI claims that its member groups represent points “across the political spectrum,” its coalition members in fact hail exclusively from the political Left. These members include the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), MoveOn.org, the Center for American Progress Action Fund , USAction, Win Without War, Vote Vets, Campaign for America’s Future, the United States Student Association, Working Assets, Americans United for Change, Campus Progress Action, and the National Security Network.

From its earliest days, AAEI’s principal source of funding has been MoveOn.org. SEIU has also contributed heavily, as have a number of individual donors whose identities Matzzie refuses to publicly disclose. By September 2007, AAEI had spent $12 million on a combination of grass-roots organizing, polling (Matzzie hired the prominent Democratic pollsters Stan and Anna Greenberg), and television advertisements aimed at persuading the American public and Washington legislators that U.S. involvement in the Iraq War was bad policy. Matzzie states that shaping the media’s coverage of the war, and thereby “influencing the environment that the debate is taking place in,” constitutes “a huge part of what we [AAEI] do.”According to a September 2007 New York Times piece: “[AAEI] coordinates extensively with Democrats on Capitol Hill. Matzzie himself meets with Speaker Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, ‘maybe once a month,’ he says, adding that he talks to their staffs ‘once a day, or at least a couple times a week.’ (Senior Democratic aides sometimes even join AAEI’s conference calls.) This might entail discussions of political strategy or more substantive policy briefings by experts from AAEI’s member think tanks.”

I caught this on Fox’s news ticker this morning, but is it really true that Media Blathers is claiming that Rush edited his broadcast to deny their claims?

JinxMcHue on October 2, 2007 at 3:08 PM

MediaMatters is indeed saying that Rush edited the transcript of his show. Their arugment is that Armed Forces Radio did not hear the original broadcast — since they only broadcast one hour of the Limbaugh show. When Rush addressed the smear durint the first hour of a subsequent broadcast (so AFR listeners could hear it), he deleted 1 minute 50 seconds of his conversation. Apparently this gap was between the original mention of “phony soldiers” and Rush’s in-depth discussion of Macbeth. Oooooo… 1:50. I don’t even know if it’s true — not interested enough to compare the transcripts of the two shows. But even if it is — big whoop! So he did not mention a specific example 90 seconds sooner. Everyone knows that Rush supports the troops — far more than Reid, Durbin, or their ilk. I wish they would survey the troops to see if they want to keep Rush on AFR. I bet the response would be overwhelming!

don’t know if the pipsqueaks atthis blog are worth paying attention to, but they’ve identified vetwerans for freedom as nazis, one poster even drew a comparison of the veterans at gathering of eagles with the proto-nazi freikorps.

I really have to wonder about something here. To hear the Conventional Wisdom ™, the Bush Admistration is so inept, so stupid, and so hated by the entire country that there is no way in the depths of Hades that any Republican could even think of having a chance of winning the White House next year. And I admit, I’ve considered that as well, just like in ’76, there was no way Ford would win after the Nixon situation.

So when you apply that, depending on the eventual Democrat nominee, all they pretty much have to do is at least appear competent (that being a key word I’ve heard from even good pundits), and not say anything too terribly stupid, and it’s a waltz to 1600 Penn.

So why, oh why are they going out of their way this early to try to discredit, remove, or otherwise malign any voice of “opposition,” in an apparent attempt to remove any real or perceived obstacles?

When one engages in these sort of tactics, either directly or indirectly such as Hillery, there is always a chance that it will backfire in your face.

I can only come up with a couple of possible reasons for this. One, they are so desparate to gain the power that they are blinded to the possible backlash, and are trying to not take ANY chance on the “stupidity” of the electorate. Two, is it possible, just perhaps, that all this hatred of AllThingBush is even more ginned up than even we believe? Is it possible that Americans really DO support the efforts of our military to help secure peace and prosperity in one of the poorest parts of the planet?

Hey, where are our Congressmen and Senators on this? I don’t hear them standing up for Rush. They should be using this to counter-attack Media Matters and the other Stalinist activists.

After all Rush has done for the Conservative Movement, he’s our national treasure. Shame on anyone too timid to stand up for him now.

Left unchecked, their attacks will build in the months ahead into a campaign for restoring the ‘fairness doctrine’, to take conservative thinking off the air altogether. Hillary, given half a chance, will make this happen.

According to their definition, you yell “RUN AWAY!” and flee in panic like in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Wesley Clark has joined the left in attempting to remove Rush from AFRTS.

CommentGuy on October 2, 2007 at 3:36 PM

Of course, neither Weaselly Clark nor (the rest of) the left would ever consider asking the troops what they want–first of all because they could care less, and second because they know it would be to keep Rush.

It’s utterly laughable that liberals who hate America and the military think they can score points for patriotism by smearing an actual patriotic American. But then it would obviously be too repugnant to them to score points for patriotism by genuinely being patriotic.

JamesLee – good points! I’ve also thought that if the Repubs couldn’t win another election for the life of them, why oh why are the Dems raising so much money? Heck, there are some 3rd world countries you can buy for much less than what this election is going to cost.

You have to understand how Limbaugh runs the show. He does his show prep by reading the legacy media, hits Dextrosphere blogs like mm and here, and comes up with a list of things he wants to talk about. He gives that list to Snerdley, who puts through calls from people who want to talk about those things. (Except for Open Line Friday, when you can talk about other things.)

So Rush has on a sheet, index cards, or post-its in front of him the things he wants to hit, and McBeth, Beauchamp, etc. was one of those things. The call comes through, and Rush reads the screen where his transcriptionist types in real time what the caller is saying (because his hearing is so bad, even with the implant, that he misses stuff), and when the caller has set the table sufficiently, (the purpose of a caller being to make the host look good) he launches his preplanned missiles.

In this case, Rush had two things going on at the same time; riding McBeth for longer than a Morning Update would allow, and the caller making specific reference to the previous caller. To the staff people who edited out the 90 seconds of talking about the other guy, it wasn’t relevant to what Rush wanted to talk about, McBeth.

VoteVets are probably very similar to Vietnam Veterans Against The War that Kerry used in order to smear the military back in the 70s. Most of them couldn’t find Vietnam on a map. I would probably guess that there are not any Infantrymen in this organization. I may be wrong. In Nam for every guy doing the fighting there were 7 that didn’t know a war was going on. This could easily be the same scenario.

I cannot for the life of me figure out why our Afganistan and Iraq vets are not demanding Reid’s, Harkin’s, Murtha’s, and Durbin’s resignation.
Can you imagine the number of signatures that petition would get?
Dirty Harry’s numbers calling for condemnation of Rush would pale in comparison.

Remember, conservative outrage over the “Betray Us” ad is juvenile nonsense that wastes time which would be better spent debating Iraq. Liberal outrage over Rush Limbaugh is important national business.

KP was of that “this is a distraction from the debate on Iraq” during the MoveOn thing… I’ll be interested to see if she says the same thing about the Limbaugh situation.

So why, oh why are they going out of their way this early to try to discredit, remove, or otherwise malign any voice of “opposition,” in an apparent attempt to remove any real or perceived obstacles?
JamesLee on October 2, 2007 at 3:30 PM
They are like sharks on a feeding frenzy. Not to do so would be out of character.